hartje on the slovak national team is changing my life im genuinely going to call the iihf in the morning and ask them if its gonna be on iihf.tv because i have to see this so bad like she's played in a couple preseason games before with them but this time she's legit on the roster im so freaking excited

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They thing about women’s sports is that I think most of us who watch them want a future of all gender sports leagues but unless you have a way to make misogyny go away in the next week and cis men to actually, meaningfully allow other genders to compete with them and share resources without harassment, women’s leagues going away would just mean women do not play sports anymore (or, play it in secret unsanctioned events like it used to be.) And the biggest thing you can do is 1) fight against the idea that these spaces should only be for certain kinds of women (cis women, white women, upper class women, etc) and refocus / realign these spaces to be for anyone experiencing gender marginalization who is denied access to traditional sporting spaces 2) invest enough resources into these athletes until they’re just too good to deny the most predominant spaces in sports that men occupy

The thing that annoys me is way too many people, including other people on the left, is acting as if women’s sports came about because some women went up to their college admin like “we want to play basketball but we’re too scared to play with the boys :(“ instead of it mainly being clubs and teams of women who suffered nonstop harassment playing on boys clubs and were refused playin time or resources or were literally barred from competing and had to do it in secret / after hours / etc and were mainly asking for a place to just safely play and work on their craft and saying if you won’t let us in, we’ll create our own. There are obviously some women athletes right now pushing bullshit narratives and getting in on the grift of “well we need this because we’re weaker we know we’re not as good as the boys~” but there’s a lot more that understand these places exist because begging cis men for scraps in their spaces wasn’t working so they created their own

100%, also like not a 1:1 on any sense as the social context and systems of oppression were very different but in a philosophical sense / understanding how these sporting spaces can be born as a response to oppression without endorsing said oppression, another historical example would be the existence of the Negro Leagues in baseball. They existed because of the color line in baseball, Jim Crow laws, and segregation meant they could not participate in the existent major leagues, but the Negro Leagues themselves were not created by white people or pro-segregation, they were spaces in which Black people could continue their athletic careers / crafts with less harassment, a better chance at controlling the resources within the playing field even if there were less resources than their white counterparts, and the ability to keep making money from the sport. It also meant that once integration did happen, there were players ready to compete right away in terms of skill level because the leagues got better with time and players got better. It was not perfect and they were still given less pay, resources, and respect than white teams and faced intense harassment, but it was an improvement from either playing on the majority white teams in the indie leagues where they got treated horribly or not playing at all, and Black baseball players were able to form their own communities and make their own history in that time

i hate the pwhl schedule. why don't you play at the same time as literally every other northern hemisphere women's league so the players cut from the roster in preseason aren't completely fucked over for roster spots and a bunch of woho coaching staff haven't already been claimed by other leagues by the time the pwhl is hiring. pwhl why do you suck so fucking much

It's amazing when you love a player

Mathea Fischer going to Toronto camp! Another good invite imo in that she has a possible high ceiling, great Norwegian player and former UBC player for my USports pals :-)